Understanding Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration : หน้า 51/164

Suzanne Jeffrey “Samma Sati, or Right Mindfulness, refers to correctly maintaining and stilling our mind inside of our self. Not wandering around, in other words. We must always be training ourselves to be careful – not to be reckless. This takes practice, of course, but with practice, we will be able to gain this state. Right Mindfulness encourages us to earnestly and continuously practice meditation to gain further and further progress and insight. “Now the eighth is Right Concentration, or Samma Samadhi. This, of course, is all about meditation. Initially, this refers to correctly and steadily placing the mind in the center of the body, or the center of our very being. If we continuously focus our mind in the practice of meditation, it will lead us to attaining inner brightness which arises from the center of our being. The subsequent result of using this inner brightness from within will be to observe the true nature of the world and life. Simultaneously, we will gain purity, brightness, and calmness. As we repeatedly practice meditation, we will drive the entire cycle forward and eventually, this will lead to Enlightenment. “So now that we understand the cycle, we need to understand that this does not stop with us going around one cycle, but as we continue to go around and around, and the more we understand it, use it, and meditate on it, the more it will mean to us in our lives. We can then apply what we have learned and become happier people. Our minds will become more refined and eventually, this will lead us to inner peace, inner purity, and inner light. Of course, if we continue to become more refined, we will become enlightened! “As I said in the beginning of this talk, each person has his or her own sphere or cycle and we all start our journey at different places, in different moods if you will, and at different times of our lives so that we come to understand it in different ways. Because we have all been taught differently, and we have different habits that we have developed throughout our lives, we will be looking at the path from different perspectives and we can come to view this as uniquely our own. Just because we say that we are ‘following the path’, this does not mean we are all in the same path at the same time, or have the same understanding of it. This is why we cannot be critical of one another on our journey, and we must always have love and compassion toward one another, because we never know where each of us is on the path. We must support one another on the individual journey. And, of course, this is why we must always spread loving-kindness to one another before our meditation, after our meditation, and throughout the day. We need to work on our own journey before we can be judgmental of another person’s journey. Right? “Not only do we have uniquely different journeys, we have to follow each path within